Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Hitler had argued that people would believe anything if it was repeated often enough and if disconfirming information was routinely denied, silenced, or disputed with yet more lies.

How we deal with the tough parts of our lives, he observes, “shows who we are.”

There are three main ways people find fulfillment of their life meaning, in Frankl’s view. First, there is action, such as creating a work, whether art or a labor of love—something that outlasts us and continues to have an impact. Second, he says, meaning can be found in appreciating nature, works of art, or simply loving people;

The third lies in how a person adapts and reacts to unavoidable limits on their life possibilities, such as facing their own death or enduring a dreadful fate like the concentration camps.

In short, our lives take on meaning through our actions, through loving, ...

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” For Frankl, this suggests that each of us has our unique life purpose and that serving others ennobles it. The scope and range of our actions matter less than how well we respond to the specific demands of our life circle.

everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.

Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked—and behold, duty was joy.

Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome;

the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?

To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?

The essence of achievement in true suffering, in my opinion, has perhaps been expressed most clearly in Rilke’s words, who once cried out: “How much we must suffer through!” The German language only knows the term “work through.” But Rilke grasped that our meaningful achievements in life can be fulfilled at least as well in suffering as in working.

Conversely, the fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.

We also do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.

we honestly have to ask ourselves whether the state has a duty to grant the doctor the right to destroy superfluous, useless individuals. After all, it would be conceivable that the state, as the guardian of public interest, should free the community of the burden of these highly “unproductive” individuals who consume the bread of the people who are healthy and fit for life.

In a rough review of our main conclusion, we remember above all our basic observation that life itself means being questioned and that we cannot justifiably ask about its meaning, since this meaning exists in the act of answering.

If he belonged, as was the case with my transport, to the majority of around 95 percent, then his path would lead from the train station directly to one of the gas chambers; but if he belonged, as by chance I did, to the minority of 5 percent, then his path led first to the disinfection chamber, so into a real . . . shower. Before he can enter the actual shower room, everything that he has with him is taken away, he is only allowed to keep his braces or belt, at best his spectacles or a truss. But no hair is allowed to remain on his body, he is completely shaven. When he is finally standing under the shower, nothing has remained of his whole former life except his literally “naked” existence. And now he reaches the actual point at which he enters the first phase of the experience of the concentration camp: he puts a line through his entire former existence.

No one will be surprised to hear that his next thought concerns the question of how best to commit suicide. In fact, everyone in this situation flirts, if only for a moment, with the idea of “running into the wire,” committing suicide, using the usual method in the camp: contact with the high voltage barbed-wire fence. However, he drops his intention at once, simply because it has become more or less pointless; because a suicide attempt is redundant in this situation inasmuch as the average probability of not, sooner or later, going to the gas chamber is in any case minimal. Who needs to run into the wire when he is going into the gas sooner or later? He no longer needs to wish for the “wire” once he has the “gas” to be afraid of, but he no longer needs to fear the “gas” once he has wished for the “wire.”

This is why my colleague urged us to shave every day so that, after scraping the skin on our faces with some kind of improvised shaving implement, such as a piece of broken glass, we would look “rosier,” fresher, healthier.

In fact, it was possible, by observing the typical dreams of the prisoners, to determine to what primitive wishes they were inwardly giving themselves. So, what did the men mainly dream of in the camp? Always the same: bread, cigarettes, decent ground coffee, and, last but not least, a nice warm bath (and I personally always dreamt of a very particular gateau).

The well-known characterologist Professor [Emil] Utitz, who himself spent several years in a concentration camp, thought he could observe that the character of camp inmates generally developed according to the psychological type that Kretschmer calls the schizoid.10 This type is characterized by the fact that the afflicted person swings between the affective states of apathy on the one hand and irritability on the other, while the most important other type, characterized by the cycloid temperament,11 is “rejoicing to high heaven” one minute and “in the depths of despair”12 the next; in other words, he is caught in a permanent cycle of joyful excitement and depressive sadness.

Thinking of the words of Nietzsche who once said, “Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how”—a

The most important thing I want to say regarding him concerns something that will, no doubt, greatly astonish you: it is the fact that it takes many days before the liberated person is able to enjoy his liberation. He must actually and literally relearn how to be happy. And sometimes he has to hurry to learn this, because often he will soon need to unlearn it again and must learn to suffer again. I would like to say a little about that now.

And ultimately that was the entire purpose of these three parts: to show you that people can still—despite hardship and death (first part), despite suffering from physical or mental illness (second part) or under the fate of the concentration camp (third part)—say yes to life in spite of everything.